The Ashley Madison Economy

[sunskyfan]

The whole Ashley Madison hack seems to show us, in vivid detail, a great analogy for the current modern economy. If the Fed could only print women the economy would be roaring with productivity. Any thoughts what QE really stands for? Perhaps Quantitatively Easy ;). How many of Goldman-Sachs buyers are really bots like the women on Ashley Madison?


http://gizmodo.com/ashley-madison-co...ots-1727613924

[don]

Re: The Ashley Madison Economy

If the fed could only print women

of a certain proclivity?

they have, once removed . . . .

[Thailandnotes]

Re: The Ashley Madison Economy

Well, my telephone rang it would not stop
It’s President Kennedy callin’ me up
He said, “My friend, Bob, what do we need to make the country grow?”
I said, “My friend, John, Brigitte Bardot, Anita Ekberg, Sophia Loren.
Country'll grow.

Read more: http://www.bobdylan.com/us/songs/i-s...#ixzz3kbmBciTt

[lektrode]

Re: The Ashley Madison Economy

and wheres the 'sharing economy' when ya need it...

[don]

Re: The Ashley Madison Economy

and wheres the 'sharing economy' when ya need it...

right here, lek . . .

At 11 o’clock on a Tuesday night, Amanda, a senior at Princeton University, got her first text message from Stephen, a 60-something Wall Street banker. He wanted her at his New York City apartment. Immediately.

“I told him it was too late—the trains just stopped running,” Amanda said. “He said he’d send a limo.”

Amanda agreed, on the condition that she’d be back on campus for her 10 o’clock class the next morning. After dinner at a fancy restaurant, sex, and some post-sex apartment decorating, Amanda was back in the limo. When she got back to Princeton, she had just enough time to change her clothes, grab her books, and run to class.

Stephen is just one of the many men Amanda has met on Seeking Arrangement, a website that connects “sugar babies”—young, pretty women—with “sugar daddies”—usually rich, older men. On Seeking Arrangement, the most important part of the profile is the number at the top of the page: net worth. Men with annual incomes of over $5 or $10 million get the most attention. The site advertises “mutually beneficial relationships,” in which young women shower men with attention in exchange for “the finer things in life”—fancy dinners, extravagant vacations, or monthly allowances. What the site doesn’t talk about is sex. But sex, I was told by multiple sugar babies, is what everybody’s thinking about.

In 2013, Seeking Arrangement announced that approximately 44 percent of its 2.3 million “babies” are in college. This is a trend that the website encourages—if babies register with a .edu email account, they receive a free premium membership (something the guys have to shell out as much as $1,200 for).

Seeking Arrangement creates the illusion that the sexual element of these relationships isn’t forced, but organic. No one associated with the website wants to admit that what it’s doing is facilitating sex-for-money exchanges. The large number of college women on the site helps preserve this illusion, for both the daddies and the babies.

“Dating a college woman fulfills these guys’ wildest dreams. They want someone highly educated who is eager to learn,” said Parinda Wanitwat, director of the documentary Daddies Date Babies, which profiles several college sugar babies living in New York City.

In almost every message Amanda receives on Seeking Arrangement, sugar daddies comment on how intelligent she sounds in her profile. Amanda has met more than 50 men through the site. All of them are well-educated, the majority are business executives.

While some men on the site use it exclusively for sex, the majority want sex and something else. They want someone to come along on business trips, go to company events, and meet their friends—someone who understands and appears interested in what they have to say. Most importantly, they want someone who will help them pretend that the relationship is not a transaction.

Only one sugar baby I interviewed said she discussed her fee upfront, on the first date. The rest said they preferred to let the issue of compensation “come up naturally.”

The women I talked to found that avoiding a conversation about money actually led to more of it. When she first signed up on the site, Rebecca, a sophomore at NYU, asked potential sugar daddies about money right away—sometimes even before the first date. After a few months of making far less than her friends on the site, she decided to stop asking. She started waiting for the daddy to bring up the money issue and was immediately more successful.

Like Rebecca, Amanda never directly asks for money. Instead, she waits until the sugar daddy is comfortable enough to give her a credit card in his name.
“I get to a point in these relationships when the guy starts to naturally want to pay for things for me. They prefer giving me a credit card because it feels more informal. There is no direct exchange of money,” Amanda said.

In this way, it’s easier for the men—and, to a certain extent, the women—to pretend the transaction never actually happened.

“I found that some, if not most, of the guys don’t want to talk about money. I suspect that’s because it kills the fantasy,” said Wanitwat. “They’re trying to pretend that these smart, beautiful women actually want to hang out with them.”

The illusion works the other way, as well. When a friend of mine started to think about joining Seeking Arrangement in our senior year, she told me the site was extremely popular among college students. She said tons of girls at Columbia and NYU had profiles to help pay tuition bills. This made the website seem safer, and less like prostitution. If half the women on the site really were college students—and the guys had a particular interest in meeting college students—maybe the work wasn’t just purely physical.

Maybe it really was about the conversation and companionship, not just the sex.

[jk]

Re: The Ashley Madison Economy

just another example of "the magic of the market" facilitated by the internet. another consequence of rising tuition costs, it seems, plus it brings a whole new meaning to "working your way through college."

[dcarrigg]

Re: The Ashley Madison Economy

just another example of "the magic of the market" facilitated by the internet. another consequence of rising tuition costs, it seems, plus it brings a whole new meaning to "working your way through college."

It's particularly tough going to school in Manhattan. A kid I know from up the road went to Columbia for grad school because it was the best school he could get into. His parents tried to help. He maxed out loans. He'd be homeless for part of his education. The school's aware of this and just can't seem to figure out any solution. They don't keep enough housing for the grad students. It was a core group of homeless NYU students that seemed to be leading the early days of organizing in the 2011 occupy wall street protests. Stories of homeless students at Berkeley abound. It's actually popular now to rent a tent in someone's back yard for a few hundred per month. You can't take out loans passed your "expected costs of living," and they factor in only something like $20k annually for rent+utilities+transportation+food+books+clothes+e ntertainment etc. Which is utterly impossible in places where the median 2 bed apartment rents for $3,000/mo. If some of the girls are turning to prostitution, just imagine the kinds of criminal shenanigans some of the boys are up to to make ends meet.

Of course, homelessness with university access isn't the worst thing ever. There's a gym. There's showers. There's usually free food you can take from somewhere. Libraries are open fairly late. Naps on chairs aren't weird. Worse things could happen. Still, the cost of housing in some places makes going to school in them asinine.

I like PoZ's post. I think he was pretty much spot-on. But I'd add this addendum:

All else being equal, seriously consider the real estate market the school is in. If it's UC San Diego vs. Case Western Reserve, it should be a no-brainer. Case-Western is the far superior choice for an undergrad.

Look at it this way: In the overheated RE bubble markets (NYC, Boston, DC, SF Bay, LA, San Diego), you're talking dropping a minimum of $10k in rent per year, if you can get student housing, and if it's cheap enough. In the affordable markets (Cleveland, Pittsburgh, upstate NY, upstate IL, Augusta GA, etc), it's possible to just buy a 4 bed single-family house outright in live-in condition for about the $40k you'd drop in rent for 4 years otherwise. And that's cheap rent. Rent can easily start to exceed that. Plus food will be more expensive. Gas will be more expensive. Heating and cooling. You name it.

For grad school, all else being equal, it might even be more important. That stipend is going to pay out about $20k whether it's in Cleveland, OH or Cambridge, MA. Only in Cambridge, you're going to be broke on it. Even the school-subsidized graduate apartments are going to charge $1,200/mo per bed in rent. In Cleveland, you can pay off your mortgage and in year 2 or 3 and walk out owning something. Put the rest of the money towards whatever. Right near the university too.

[DRumsfeld2000]

Re: The Ashley Madison Economy

Of course these women are strong minded and independent and are not being used and abused. LOL )

[sunskyfan]

Re: The Ashley Madison Economy

Just image if someone had the idea of building MORE universities? ;) ..... last time I checked a new state endorsed school hasn't been created in some time .... think we could find some professors to populate them? ;)

The smugness of the university/academic class is almost as bad as the Jamie Diamond crowd.

[astonas]

Re: The Ashley Madison Economy

Just image if someone had the idea of building MORE universities? ;) ..... last time I checked a new state endorsed school hasn't been created in some time .... think we could find some professors to populate them? ;)

The smugness of the university/academic class is almost as bad as the Jamie Diamond crowd.

I can't speak for all public universities, of course, but the University of California is and has been legally obligated to accept the top 12.5% of all graduating high school seniors of the state to at least one campus of the system. (Another, broader, tier is similarly guaranteed acceptance into the "Cal State" system, and any H.S. graduate at all can go to a community college, and with sufficient grades, transfer to the one of the upper two tiers.)

UC Riverside, and now UC Merced, have both been opened to accommodate the expanding student pool relatively recently, and a few of my friends are more than happy to be professors there. Academic jobs are in such short supply that there is always a vast pool of highly qualified aspirants that are still unsuccessful in getting a post. No one is turning up their noses at these positions. There was more of a mad scramble for them, to be frank. There are just vastly more aspiring professors generated by our educational system than there are positions to fill.

There are certainly problems in the state of public education, but it's generally hard to argue that it is due to artificial restrictions in the supply of student slots. I don't know if the commitment to accept a fixed percentile of a state's graduates is universal, but it certainly isn't unusual among the various states.

A student gaining admission to their campus of choice within a system is a different matter, of course, which may result in more restrictive local acceptance rates, and so also differences in prestige (or as you say, smugness) between campuses within a state. But overall access rates for public higher education haven't really changed at all. In most cases, they can't. They're set in state law.

So while there may be serious political challenges in meeting goals to maintain public-funding-per-student as the educational mandate grows with a state's population, system-wide acceptance rates themselves (and hence, student slots) aren't usually discretionary at all, and thus it's hard to argue they're rigged, in public universities.

Perhaps your complaint is meant to apply to private schools? That would seem a better fit. Those do have the discretion to play the kind of games you are concerned with, though that appears to be considered perfectly acceptable to applicants, and as private institutions, they aren't really answerable to any other representative body.